Biological Physics
Accurate quantitative assessment of metabolic cost during static posture holding is a strategically important problem in biomechanics and physiology. Traditional metrics such as ``time under tension'' are fundamentally insufficient, because…
Circuits in the brain commonly exhibit modular architectures that factorise complex tasks, resulting in the ability to compositionally generalise and reduce catastrophic forgetting. In contrast, artificial neural networks (ANNs) appear to…
In tissue development, wound healing, and cancer invasion, coordinated cell motion arises from active forces produced by the cells. The relationship between force and motion remains unclear, however, because the forces result from a sum of…
Understanding the optical transmission property of human hair, especially in the infrared regime, is vital in physical, clinical, and biomedical research. However, the majority of infrared spectroscopy on human hair is performed in the…
The transduction of force into motion for microswimmers at intermediate Reynolds numbers ($Re \sim 1$), where inertia becomes relevant, is a fundamental problem in active matter. Using the multicellular alga \textit{Volvox} as a model…
Intracellular protein patterns govern essential cellular functions by dynamically redistributing proteins between membrane-bound and cytosolic states, conserving their total numbers. This review presents a theoretical framework for…
The cochlea's capacity to process a broad range of sound intensities has been linked to nonlinear amplification by critical oscillators. However, while the increasing sensitivity of a critical oscillator upon decreasing the stimulus…
Red blood cells (RBCs) sustain mechanical stresses associated with microcirculatory flow through ATP-driven plasma membrane flickering. This is an active phenomenon driven by motor proteins that regulate interactions between the spectrin…
During mitosis, near-spherical chromosomes reconfigure into rod-like structures to ensure their accurate segregation to daughter cells. We explore here, the interplay between the nonequilibrium activity of molecular motors in determining…
In the pathogenic parasite Trypanosoma brucei, a laterally attached flagellum drives rapid deformation of the complex cell body, producing puzzling dynamics. High-speed defocusing imaging reveals that surface points trace flower-like…
In complex systems, groups of interacting objects may form prevalent and persistent spatiotemporal patterns, which we refer to as motifs. These motifs can exhibit features that reveal how individual objects interact with one another.…
Across biological subdisciplines, the last decade has seen an explosion of high-dimensional datasets, including datasets for cells, species, immune systems, neurons and behaviour. At the ICTS workshop 'Unifying Theories in High-Dimensional…
Tissue deformations during morphogenesis can be active, driven by internal processes, or passive, resulting from stresses applied at their boundaries. Here, we introduce the Drosophila hindgut primordium as a model for studying…
Type II Topoisomerases (topo II) are critical to simplify genome topology during transcription and replication. They identify topological problems and resolve them by passing a double-stranded DNA segment through a transient break in…
We study spreading processes in two-dimensional systems of heterogeneous active agents that exhibit different individual active speeds. We obtain, combining kinetic and complex network theory, an analytical expression for the spreading…
Machine learning (ML) has become a versatile tool for analyzing anomalous diffusion trajectories, yet most existing pipelines are trained on large collections of simulated data. In contrast, experimental trajectories, such as those from…
The formation of polarized signaling domains on cell membranes is a fundamental example of biological pattern formation. While such patterns resemble structures from equilibrium phase separation, they are intrinsically non-equilibrium,…
Bacteriophage-bacteria interactions are central to microbial ecology, influencing evolution, biogeochemical cycles, and pathogen behavior. Most theoretical models assume static environments and passive bacterial hosts, neglecting the joint…
We experimentally demonstrate that information replication by templated ligation of DNA strands inherits a kinetic proofreading mechanism and achieves significant error suppression through cascade replication. A simple simulation model…
At its core, the physics paradigm adopts a reductionist approach, aiming to understand fundamental phenomena by decomposing them into simpler, elementary processes. While this strategy has been tremendously successful in physics, it has…